Groups of individuals such as families, sports teams, school house groups, or other groups of individuals who work or collaborate with one another often collect a great deal of material in order to capture and preserve group memories or for other purposes such as education and knowledge sharing. This material may be in physical form, such as printed photographs, sports trophies, mascots, art work, birthday cards, theatre tickets etc. It may also be in digital form such as digital photographs and home videos. For example, there is a burgeoning amount of digital media which families capture and collect using a range of devices including camcorders, digital cameras, and, increasingly, mobile phones.
Existing tools for organizing family memories offer few possibilities for easily integrating both physical and digital materials in order to produce a single archive for a family (or other group of users). Furthermore, most families feel a great deal of guilt about the fact that these materials all exist in different places, and are often collected but never properly organized. At the same time, many households report that, if there were a fire in the house, aside from rescuing loved ones and pets, family memorabilia such as photos would be the next things that would be rescued. These materials are therefore very valuable to households and families, yet we have no good coherent systems to allow us to easily archive and organize such family physical and digital media in a manner that is simple to use. This also applies to archiving of physical objects and digital media in general (even for applications outside the field of family use).
Existing archiving systems often have complex user interfaces and detailed systems for annotating and labeling items with key words in order to organize the items. This leads to problems for novice users who find it difficult to operate complex systems for archiving and accessing items from the archive.
It will be understood that the invention is not limited to implementations that solve any or all of the above noted disadvantages.